Complete update on the Gnome2 box. First I changed the profile from desktop/gnome to plain desktop using 'eselect profile`. The gnome profile kept tried to bring in gnome-common-3.7.4 even though I had it masked. I had made the following additions to /etc/oertage/package.mask

I've started another thread, "HowTo mask gnome-3.8" which might help. I'm sure it's neither complete nor comprehensive, but it works for the three deskside systems at my house. Feel free to post suggestions.

I don't actually use gnome, just some gnome packages that I happen to like. So I was quite unhappy when last Sunday the updates started changing my system into gnome/systemd._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

Another thread about this issue(Merged to that thread. Trying to clean up some of the mess around masking Gnome 3. --pjp, 2014.01.08)_________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

Last edited by eccerr0r on Wed Dec 18, 2013 6:03 pm; edited 4 times in total

You mean Gnome 2.32? I expect it'll go away. And from what I've seen in portage, I don't think masking gnome3 is being made easy. I had the same idea, but it would lead to pretty unwieldy /etc/portage/package.* files.

The best option is to switch to a plain desktop profile, get rid of everything gnome and look at alternative desktop environments, or roll your own. There's easily more than a dozen useful window managers out there.

I switched to the mate overlay and am keeping some gnome2 and some gnome3 components. The package.mask file has 6 lines, and could probably be smaller if I got rid of gdm. package.accept_keywords had some 30-odd lines added for mate, that's about it.

Yeah it will be quite a mess to mask. Though it may end up with a lot of blocks I wish real max version requirements were annotated in the ebuilds to automatically stay at a certain version.

My current worries: I am actually using Evolution and wonder what kind of a mess it will be if I switch to lxde. It's working just fine right now, including sync with my N900 so I wish I could keep it that way...

I guess I could keep one machine or a VM with gnome2 but it will be a pain to maintain that machine.

I thought the profile was supposed to do this: isn't that the point of a systemd profile, after all?

I'd have thought the gnome3 profile would inherit from systemd, and things would be masked elsewhere, since they clearly cannot run without systemd, and the profile was put in place to ensure that systemd folks could set whatever crazy stuff they liked, especially wrt vendor lock-in, without affecting the rest of us.

No, I'm not even worried about systemd at this point. I'd like to keep gnome-2 but the problem is that in the gnome profile, gnome3 is now stable so it will pick this up in updates. Gnome3 will then get systemd which is yet a different problem._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

If you're looking to stay on GNOME 2, here's my package.mask. There are likely duplicates since I grabbed two different lists a while ago and then added some more when 3.8 hit stable. You may or may not need to tweak the list and, keep in mind, GNOME 2 will likely be leaving the tree at some point. Further, this list may need to be updated every time a new package hits the system since the GNOME devs upstream chose to keep the same library names while breaking backward compatibility. You may wish to consider moving to Mate, as I have done, which is essentially GNOME 2 with the library names changed to not conflict with GNOME 3.